Re-memorializing History: Notes toward a Genrification of the Nigerian Video Film
Anthony Adah
Graduate Centre for Drama,
University of Toronto
(Canada)
In his recent review of the African Film Festival/New York 2001, Brian Larkin observes that the phenomenal popularity of Video “film” in Nigeria and Ghana necessitates revising the concept of “African Cinema.” In this paper, I draw attention to the possibility and adequacy of approaching this emerging film form as “genre film.” Current analyses of these video films centre on their thematic concerns (ill-gotten wealth, rampart corruption, witchcraft, and gore).
This paper argues that the emerging genre is a syncretism of the horror, melodrama, and gangster Hollywood genres refracted through local cultural sensibilities. Through close analyses of their formal features, I tease out the mythic conflicts that Out of Bounds (1997) and Living in Bondage (1992) dramatize and resolve. Furthermore, we assert that the films are symptomatic (but also critique) of Nigeria’s the nature of authority and governance in Nigeria especially in the traumatic period of recent Nigerian military regimes.
In their hyperbolic stylistics they perform a re-memorializing of historical and contemporaneous social and political traumas. The paper concludes by arguing that, rather than the festival art films familiar to Western audience but hardly accessible to Nigerians, video films form a beckoning site for re-thinking an African postcolonial film theory.
About Anthony Adah
Anthony Adah is a Phd candidate at the Graduate Centre for Drama, University of Toronto. He has published several articles on film and drama